Guild Wars 2

So, let’s pull up some numbers.

Guild Wars 2 Digital Edition €54.99 pre-purchase 10. April 2012
Gem purchase: €50.00
Gem purchase: €35.00
Gem purchase: €35.00
——————————————————————————-
Total: €174,99

I guess I’m not “dedicated” enough. Thank you Linsey Murdoch for making it very clear. Not once have I asked for a new tier of gear or complain that I have nothing to do. I’ve always felt that I’ve found a perfect game for myself after 6 years of WoW and other gear-progression oriented games.

I would like to thank the good folks at ArenaNet for a clear and honest statement. Not a single purchase from the gem store ever again.

P.S. I was also thinking about buying Eye of the North expansion for original Guild Wars. Guess what, no deal.

I just deinstalled the game. I will not support such a behavior.

Waffler.1257:

LadenSwallow.1468:

To those saying they want to hit ANet in their wallets:

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9053/kw/refund

I have already filed my ticket.

I tried, but I was stupid enough to pre-order the game, so they told me I was out of the 6 month window for refunds.

In that case I would try and find something equivalent to a small claims court, as you must have paid for goods and not received them for more than 4 months, yet they are claiming this as part of your time with the product?

Ahdia.8761:

I’m so disgusted and disillusioned by game companies at this point that this move doesn’t surprise me but I wish it were otherwise.

My list of companies I will never patronize again keeps growing.

EA (because of business practices)
Bioware (because of ME2, DA2)
Blizzard (Because of how they handled D3)
and now, Arena Net

Now, I’m poor, so I havn’t been using cash on the gem store. However, I have participated in driving up the gold price of gems by a fair amount, encouraging others to spend cash. I would have been willing to spend money on them in the future, when new items were released, given that there’s no subscription and I wanted to support my game.

Yesterday, I asked for a refund.

_
On a lighter note:

NCSoft: ( waves hand) “This isn’t the game you’re looking for.”

Players: “This isn’t the game we’re looking for.”

NCSoft: “You can go about your business.”

Players: “We will go about our business. Without you.”

NCSoft: “Move along.”

Players: “Move along? We are SO moving along.”

Anet: “I can’t understand how we lost all those players! I think we’re dead!”

NCSoft: “The PR can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.”

Lanhelin.3480:

We have to go on strike. The We-just-log-in-for-Skin-Strike. No playing, no trading, no gem buying, nothing. We only log into the Forums to declare our displeasure until Anet rows back. This might take a few weeks, but it is necessary. This is the only way to get what we want. Less logged-in players results in less countable data and is unfortunately the only statistics Anet and NCSoft will react to. Forums are designed to give enough time and space for sstorms, but this is serious. We go on strike. And it’s done, when it’s done (:p at all developers out there).

I haven’t logged in to the game since Monday when the news about the patch arised – and many players participated – and do so till now. Because we are the community and we are the customers and we decide about rise and fall.

If you like to join us, stay out of the game but stay logged in to the forums. And keep declaring your displeasure. We are the majority.

They dont care about loggin in to the game, A-Net cares about our money….or is it NC-Soft? I decided not to buy anything here since this came up, this is not the game i bought.

Waffler.1257:

LadenSwallow.1468:

To those saying they want to hit ANet in their wallets:

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9053/kw/refund

I have already filed my ticket.

I tried, but I was stupid enough to pre-order the game, so they told me I was out of the 6 month window for refunds.

At the very least, the request for a refund will be logged and viewed by someone important. It shows a lot more dedication to what your saying when that stat hits them then just counting posts on a forum. Talk is cheap.

LadenSwallow.1468:

Waffler.1257:

LadenSwallow.1468:

To those saying they want to hit ANet in their wallets:

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9053/kw/refund

I have already filed my ticket.

I tried, but I was stupid enough to pre-order the game, so they told me I was out of the 6 month window for refunds.

In that case I would try and find something equivalent to a small claims court, as you must have paid for goods and not received them for more than 4 months, yet they are claiming this as part of your time with the product?

Maybe, but it’s probably not worth the trouble. I pre-ordered mid-April, so I would have until mid-October for a refund according to their terms I guess. They could always say the beta access I received was compensation anyway.

LadenSwallow.1468:

Waffler.1257:

LadenSwallow.1468:

To those saying they want to hit ANet in their wallets:

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9053/kw/refund

I have already filed my ticket.

I tried, but I was stupid enough to pre-order the game, so they told me I was out of the 6 month window for refunds.

In that case I would try and find something equivalent to a small claims court, as you must have paid for goods and not received them for more than 4 months, yet they are claiming this as part of your time with the product?

Try going to your state atorney generals website and file a complaint for a bait and switch. Bait-and-switch frauds are illegal, Anet may get fined.

The US Justice Dept also goes after bait-and-switch fraudsters.

I’ll play until I stop having fun (the effects of a gear treadmill), but Anet won’t be getting anymore money from me, which is all that matters. I know I won’t be coming back to play in the future when there are so many other games that I can play with a gear treadmill. Just to clarify, I’ve enjoyed the entire GW series up until this point, so it really is a big disappointment.

Ferguson.2157:

Try going to your state atorney generals website and file a complaint for a bait and switch. Bait-and-switch frauds are illegal, Anet may get fined.

The US Justice Dept also goes after bait-and-switch fraudsters.

This doesn’t meet the definition of a bait and switch though. B+S (oh the poetry of that acronym) involves advertising a product without the intention of selling it, and offering a more expensive product once the customer is hooked.

For example, putting a bunch of hard drives on sale for dirt cheap, but only stocking 5 of them, and oh-so conveniently placing them on the shelf next to a full priced drive.

Anet’s actions could only go under misleading advertising, or not delivering the advertised product. How much weight that has considering it’s an ongoing service, I don’t know.

I’ll find out I suppose. Their 180 on their manifesto seems to fit my sates Bait-and-switch laws. I’ll know when the AGs office gets back to me.

US Justice Dept recently litigated Bioware over ME ending – but lost as courts allowed a level of puffery. This 180 in my mind is much greater than that exageration on Biowares ads. That litigation happened because one customer felt he had been riped off and made a formal complaint.

It may not work, but I feel like a victim of fraud and need to fight back with the tools our legal system has. It may do nothing but then again..

Nymia.3256:

http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/chart?symbol=036570.KS

What?? I for one can’t believe this new innovative strategy of non-grindy fun based gameplay has tanked the NCSoft stock.

I mean.. what gives here guys? They finally added what all of the “most dedicated players” clearly had a “basic need” for… “proper gear progression”.

Shouldn’t that stock price be at an all time high!!!!?!?!11/!?!

Oh wait a minute… it’s at a 52 week LOW?!

Who could have ever seen that coming. I know I sure didn’t.

Gosh, I didn’t know the closing of City of Heroes was such a huge blow to NCsoft. I hope they recover! :v

LadenSwallow.1468:

To those saying they want to hit ANet in their wallets:

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9053/kw/refund

I have already filed my ticket.

Yeah, I also pre-purchased, have spent a few hundred in in total buying mostly inventory space for characters I just deleted.

Best i can do in protest is log on, dance in my undies while taking up space in LA and WvW, talk politics and crack really bad jokes about ‘stat-ism’ the progressive scourge that has invaded tyria… basically drive other players mental.

Though if I RP it just right, it ought to be loads of fun.

WOHOO! Wait till sunday night and the final event to held in LA

Today’s word boys and Girls is Disconnect, Can you spell Disconnect?

Ferguson.2157:

I’ll find out I suppose. Their 180 on their manifesto seems to fit my sates Bait-and-switch laws. I’ll know when the AGs office gets back to me.

US Justice Dept recently litigated Bioware over ME ending – but lost as courts allowed a level of puffery. This 180 in my mind is much greater than that exageration on Biowares ads. That litigation happened because one customer felt he had been riped off and made a formal complaint.

It may not work, but I feel like a victim of fraud and need to fight back with the tools our legal system has. It may do nothing but then again..

I like and hope you’re serious.

Lanhelin.3480:

If you like to join us, stay out of the game but stay logged in to the forums. And keep declaring your displeasure. We are the majority.

1% of the population does 99% of the grinding! Occupy Lion’s Arch!

Gotta hand it to the Anet developers they made it super easy to uninstall. It’s not even in my programs list. Just highlight>Delete key and poof!

16G of freed space!

IonicBlaze.7948:

They dont care about loggin in to the game, A-Net cares about our money….or is it NC-Soft? I decided not to buy anything here since this came up, this is not the game i bought.

You shouldn’t log in, because the only way for Anet to get predictable information about players is their ingame-statistics. If you log in then you are one of those, who are potential gem buyers in the future because of upcoming “features for progress”. If you do not want these patch changes, and do not support Anets way they are going right now, do not log in to the game until Anet rows back. Join the strike.

Nerth.3940:

So, let’s pull up some numbers.

Guild Wars 2 Digital Edition €54.99 pre-purchase 10. April 2012
Gem purchase: €50.00
Gem purchase: €35.00
Gem purchase: €35.00
——————————————————————————-
Total: €174,99

I guess I’m not “dedicated” enough. Thank you Linsey Murdoch for making it very clear. Not once have I asked for a new tier of gear or complain that I have nothing to do. I’ve always felt that I’ve found a perfect game for myself after 6 years of WoW and other gear-progression oriented games.

I would like to thank the good folks at ArenaNet for a clear and honest statement. Not a single purchase from the gem store ever again.

P.S. I was also thinking about buying Eye of the North expansion for original Guild Wars. Guess what, no deal.

Your spending habits likely reflect that of the average player and there pretty close to mine, this sort of gave me an “Ericka” moment.
I’ve been racking my brain as to why they would make this move, drastically departing from their core ideologies, and I finally figured it out.

MONEY!

It’s really simple players that stop levelling and reach the maximum gear stop spending large sums of gold.

When players no longer have a need for gold they stop buying gold from Arena Net, and you can bet a good portion of players just said “screw it” and spent real world money on gems converted it back to in game gold and there you have it instant best in Slot Gear. Oh, and then they came to the forums and complained they didn’t have anything to work for….LOL

Now because the Legendary weapons are too far a gap for players to “buy” into and there was no power benefit many just said no thanks to them and were happy with their Exotic gear. This is not a good thing for Arena net they need players to have a need for items to keep the revenue stream lubricated.

Now, Arena Net doesn’t care how many of you are playing so much as you all keep using the store and buying your way into better armor. So what do you do, we are 3 months post launch and revenue is dropping off.

I know….I know …..we put out a new gear type with greater stats then exotics and we bake in the set bonuses so we make it harder for players to complete sets. The set pieces will then get traded over the TP and players in a rush to get there set piece will buy gold from us to get them.

Then we’ll add a new slot in the gear for infusions and we’ll give them stats as well and mitigation for special dungeons we’ll put in. Each time we put in a new dungeon we’ll just add new infusions again.

Oh, and this time we’ll make sure crafter can’t craft it and we’ll release 1 or 2 pieces every month so we can keep a steady flow of revenue coming in.
It’s Genius …. if you’re not on the receiving end.

Waffler.1257:

LadenSwallow.1468:

To those saying they want to hit ANet in their wallets:

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9053/kw/refund

I have already filed my ticket.

I tried, but I was stupid enough to pre-order the game, so they told me I was out of the 6 month window for refunds.

I must say this policy is over-the-top ridiculous.
So, I was a dedicated fan and pre -purchased inApril…
At least they offered me a refund on Gem purchases, but I refused it – I want a full refund of my account purchase, if I can’t het that, the. hell, I’ll keep my account to run around with baby Quaggans.
I’ve already received a refund for the account I bought for my boyfriend in July though.

I just can’t believe, that after 10+ years of this garbage with various MMOs, I bought into it again. I’m really at a loss that ANET went this direction with GW2. That they so completely departed from everything they promised. That they so swiftly sold out their staunchest supporters, and left us out in the cold. Ascended is a gear grind, it is the very definition of a gear grind…no amount of PR or semantics are going to change that. Really tough pill to swallow, huh guys? Question is, will you ever trust another gaming company to deliver on its word again?

I love it. No real response from Arenanet.

Bugged even during the “guest” feature that brought it all of the “dedicated” gamers they are now going after.

They are screaming GW2 is still just as bad as it was
We have 2 new requests from these “dedicated” players. One wanting the trinity back and one with 1v1 dueling like is “industry standard”

Welcome to Guild Craft 2

Lemuria.3195:

For all the arguments against adding another equipment tier the only one I’ve heard which isn’t already present with the existing tiers is that Anet said they wouldn’t add a ‘gear grind’. Worse is there’s no evidence supporting that there even will be a gear grind, as absolutely everything is just conjecture. Every MMO in existence has had some logical form of equipment progression, so why are so many vocally opposed to Guild Wars doing likewise?

You have to look at stat progression for what it is to really get why there’s so much concern. There are 2 reasons for a developer to add it:
1) You want to give players something to work for.
2) You are tuning your high end content against it.
Both of these require you to repeat the process each and every time you release high end content in order for it to work well. This can be fine and very satisfying if your game revolves around it.

There are however tradeoffs to progressing like this.
1) All of the content that came before it is now under tuned for this level of gear. That means what a lot of what people look for in an end game (something to do) gets thinned down to a razor thin slice in terms of variety.
2) Once stat inflation is in it is really hard to remove. The outcry in this thread is nothing compared to what would happen if they announced they were bringing stats back down to exotic level after releasing newer sets.
3) It starts to push players more and more into separate groups, and gives players with alts or real life breaks more barriers to get back in and play with their friends. This compounds over time as more gear is released.
4) It makes it really hard for developers to get a baseline on balance as adding in inflated stats all the time gives them no norm to develop content around so only the current content is tuned and adjusted.

For me it’s the invalidation of the old content that worries me. That to me was a huge selling point of this game that distinguishes it over most of the competition. I’m already seeing the content I’m doing now getting really easy with the upgrade to exotics. Better stats will only make this worse and push more groups away from it as people chase power. Instead of AC being something fun for a change of pace in 3 years time, it will end up being irrelevant content within months as storymode dungeons pretty much are already.

Wolfend.5287:

Lanhelin.3480:

Occupy Lion’s Arch!

rp against progress!

In case of policeforces reading this forum, I have to admit: we have no leader! there’s nobody to make responsible for the strike, there’s just the 99%. And yes to rp against progress!

Make sure you express your views in game too! Even a threadnaught on the forums won’t change their mind unless there’s evidence large numbers of ordinary players are unhappy, and to do that we need to keep players who don’t come to the forums informed of the problem.

Tips:
Don’t get banned: be polite, don’t spam, and don’t exaggerate or go for deliberately inflammatory statements. You’re trying to keep people informed about the problem.
Use the quotes: you may have seen the manifesto quotes many times before, but not everyone in game has.
Engage with people who seem neutral, not anyone who just wants to fight. You’re much more likely to convince someone who asks “wait, I’m not clear why ascended gear is bad”
than someone who responds “get lost, they SAID THEY WERE FIXING THE GAP!!!”
Don’t attack people going for ascended items. They are reasonable for wanting the best gear; it’s not their fault ANet decided best=higher stats.
Let the actual negative consequences of ascended gear speak for themselves, when people start going “lfm ascended only”.

Logun.2349:

Your spending habits likely reflect that of the average player and there pretty close to mine, this sort of gave me an “Ericka” moment.
I’ve been racking my brain as to why they would make this move, drastically departing from their core ideologies, and I finally figured it out.

MONEY!

It’s really simple players that stop levelling and reach the maximum gear stop spending large sums of gold.

When players no longer have a need for gold they stop buying gold from Arena Net, and you can bet a good portion of players just said “screw it” and spent real world money on gems converted it back to in game gold and there you have it instant best in Slot Gear. Oh, and then they came to the forums and complained they didn’t have anything to work for….LOL

Now because the Legendary weapons are too far a gap for players to “buy” into and there was no power benefit many just said no thanks to them and were happy with their Exotic gear. This is not a good thing for Arena net they need players to have a need for items to keep the revenue stream lubricated.

Now, Arena Net doesn’t care how many of you are playing so much as you all keep using the store and buying your way into better armor. So what do you do, we are 3 months post launch and revenue is dropping off.

I know….I know …..we put out a new gear type with greater stats then exotics and we bake in the set bonuses so we make it harder for players to complete sets. The set pieces will then get traded over the TP and players in a rush to get there set piece will buy gold from us to get them.

Then we’ll add a new slot in the gear for infusions and we’ll give them stats as well and mitigation for special dungeons we’ll put in. Each time we put in a new dungeon we’ll just add new infusions again.

Oh, and this time we’ll make sure crafter can’t craft it and we’ll release 1 or 2 pieces every month so we can keep a steady flow of revenue coming in.
It’s Genius …. if you’re not on the receiving end.

Those kind of players don’t buy legit gold mate. They buy it from the gold sellers because it’s a lot cheaper. I’m not a very social person and I’ve met several of them having no problem admitting it.

They don’t even care if they get banned because there’s always a new and shiny MMO around the corner.

Sadly, I think in this one instance we, the folks against vertical progression, are the vocal minority.

I logged in 2 hours before the Lost Shore event started and I saw no one in Lion’s Arch even mentioning/complaining about the new tier. For about an hour and a half I stood there just listening to map chat and still not once did anyone raise a stink about the new tier. When the event did start, there were hundreds of players who showed up to participate causing massive lag all around, but still no complaints/comments about the new tier.

My guess is, these people are indifferent to the idea, and presumably they far out number us here.

kamizefrog.3421:

Sadly, I think in this one instance we, the folks against vertical progression, are the vocal minority.

I logged in 2 hours before the Lost Shore event started and I saw no one in Lion’s Arch even mentioning/complaining about the new tier. For about an hour and a half I stood there just listening to map chat and still not once did anyone raise a stink about the new tier. When the event did start, there were hundreds of players who showed up to participate causing massive lag all around, but still no complaints/comments about the new tier.

My guess is, these people are indifferent to the idea, and presumably they far out number us here.

Every game I’ve ever played, even the worst of the worst, had big spikes in population on patch day because players eat up the new content. You know, content locusts and all that.

Kamize I would tend to agree with you because most of our 125 member guild has got the “I’ll wait and see” 2 officers have resigned from the game and moved on while we have other officers defending this gear gating system and gear grind.

Really unhappy with this development. I firmly believed in the idea that this game will not feature any long form of gear progression and it is part of the reason I was so hyped about it. There is an endless sea of MMO’s I do not enjoy playing because I like to finish a progression and enjoy the game from there, maybe play 2-3 new characters. I really don’t understand why you would want to include your game into that already over-saturated market, when you had the ultimate tool to bind a lot of players to your game: an exclusive design. This is not the way you will get me to start spending money in the shop and the first time I actually wish you would have just produced GW:Utopia or GW1.1.

alanis.6094:

Wildclaw.6073:

alanis.6094:

Sounds like you just weren’t among their “most dedicated” customers.

The whole reason this thread is 10000 posts long is very likely because whoever was pulling the strings didn’t care about their most dedicated customers. They thought they already had them in their pocket, so why cater to them. Better to cater to the “swing” players that weren’t decided.

Perhaps someone should have explained that that strategy only works if there only are two games to choose from, and one has to get chosen.

I was making a joke about how Linsey Murdoch characterized who their “dedicated” customers were…

“As we watch Guild Wars 2 mature in its Live environment, we have found that our most dedicated players were achieving their set of Exotic gear and hitting “the Legendary wall.”

I’m in that group Linsey is referring to. My main character has a full set of exotic gear, and I have a couple alts in partial exotic. I am perfectly happy with this situation. Yes, I want Sunrise…eventually. But there is no “Legendary wall”. What about destroyer or corrupted weapons, swords like Volcanus, Foefire, or Vision of the Mists? Are those not steps between exotics and the “legendary wall”? Sure, they are exotics themselvse, but with unique skins and they are pretty hard to get…many taking some of the same items required for a legendary.

ANet had my trust, they will not keep up promises made in their manifesto and now they do not have my trust.

The more I know, the more screenshots I see about Ascended gear, about how many relics I would have to grind in order to get just one ring is bad (not what I’m thinking, but it would be against forum rules).

They are not only breaking clear statements and promises introducing this new tier of equipment, they are also doing it in such a grindy way I’ve never seen even in other traditional MMORPGs.

I will not buy more gems, I will not go inside the fractals, I will finish to experience what I paid for: map and dungeon exploration.

Then I am out.

No more games made by ANet, no expansion, nothing.

ANet you shouldn’t have made those promises, declarations and manifesto if you even had the smallest doubt about being able to keep them.

Edit: spelling.

Relentliss.2170:

I bought into the GW2 manifesto. It basically summed up how I was feeling about MMO’s.

Sadly, I see that Anet has lost their integrity and caved into WOW lovers.

This Ascended gear is The gear treadmill they said would never exist in their game. And very few players are happy about it.

This pretty neatly sums up how most people feel about this situation.

I figured it out, it was very simple all along. This was how things were back in the game I abandoned to have fun in GW2. This model actually makes profit, they add in gear that is hard to acquire and is the “best-in-slot,” which will be farmed up by the hardcore MMO players(who they cater to). These players will then sell surplus stuff on the TP. Casual players, not having enough time for farming, but wanting to get on equal footing, will buy gems, to sell for gold, to buy the latest tiered gear. My thoughts on the ascended gear is that they ran out of creativity, I mean, they could make players buy gems buy selling gear skins, give players more to do with more WvW maps, sPvP maps, dynamic events…. But they took the easy way out.

The saddest part. The only people at ANet that will ever actually read all of the thoughtful posts in this thread, are the mods who are just looking for any violations that need infractions.

I was one of those “white knights” that defended the vision of the manifesto.
Now I feel outright silly for doing so.

I’m pretty disappointed in the way things have gone, and can only hope that ArenaNet decides to listen to the players (nearly 10,000 posts, that’s more than anything I’ve seen FOR vertical progression).

I would love to see things changed back to how they were. I don’t want another gear treadmill. I quit TOR and WoW because of the gear treadmill. I came to GW2 because I wanted something different. I wanted a game that focused on the world, and story, instead of the gear.

Now it all focuses on the gear once again, the numbers, the gear checks, the gear levels, the stats.

I’m extremely disappointed, to say the least.

kamizefrog.3421:

Sadly, I think in this one instance we, the folks against vertical progression, are the vocal minority.

I logged in 2 hours before the Lost Shore event started and I saw no one in Lion’s Arch even mentioning/complaining about the new tier. For about an hour and a half I stood there just listening to map chat and still not once did anyone raise a stink about the new tier. When the event did start, there were hundreds of players who showed up to participate causing massive lag all around, but still no complaints/comments about the new tier.

My guess is, these people are indifferent to the idea, and presumably they far out number us here.

I believe this is true. Anet knows many people will be upset with the new gear tiers, and some of those will leave and never return. They’ve made a calculated business decision that they will attract more paying customers with the changes. The manifesto, the comments by the developers, they are all PR speak. You didn’t know it then, but now you do, and you can react and plan accordingly when next they speak. Fool me once…..

vox.5019:

The saddest part. The only people at ANet that will ever actually read all of the thoughtful posts in this thread, are the mods who are just looking for any violations that need infractions.

This thread is for herding us into one spot so that the problem can be easily ignored and not spill all over the forums to further incite player revolt.

Kinda like how they merged all the threads that stacked up about not having any ‘proper gear progression’ that got to 10K posts! Oh wait…

kamizefrog.3421:

My guess is, these people are indifferent to the idea, and presumably they far out number us here.

No, they are not more than us. Because the ingame chat is pretty unimportant while playing, if you do not look for a group. When I noticed this patch news, I couldn’t stay logged into the game, because there was nearly no response to my thoughts about it in the ingame chat. So I decided to go to the official forums. These people who participated in LA’s event probably never have heard a single word about this issue. Join the strike.

Who thinks we should Areananet reverse the changes made by ascended items.

by:
*Making exotic items stats the highest.
*Add one infusion slot to all exotics.
*Make infusion only usable in endless dungeons and some future content.

I want exotic to be the cap for WvW and overworld stuff.
I don’t mind if there is gear with much nicer stats that are only “active” in dungeons.

i would like wvwvw and spvp to remain exotic only, but have a gear treadmill for PVE and the addition of real bosses that require better gear and skill.

keeps me coming back.

Would be nice, but there is a large population of players who will cry that they wasted all their time grinding Ascended gear if this happens. Some things once done, can’t be undone.

Umm… then why would I grind fractals?

I kinda actually do want something to work toward.

I can see that ascended gear really isn’t going to matter much, but at least it’s something.

http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

“Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.”

Now I would understand if the system simply wasn’t working, or if they had no idea how to make an mmo without vertical progression, but they are the ones behind Guild Wars 1, which was amazingly successful and had absolutely no gear grind or power creep! Check out the list of best selling video games of all time on wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#PC – guess which game is on there? Guild Wars – with over 6.5 million copies sold!

I’m still pretty confident that they will change the system back and remove the grind – after all, they are all humans, they make mistakes and I’m 100% sure they want what’s best for their game. After all, a lot of the developers are gamers too and I simply think they just misjudged their player base needs.

As for suggestions/constructive criticism, all they have to do is look back to Guild Wars 1!

- Titles (GWAMM, Hero/Gladiator, Survivor etc.) – make them more visible and try to spice it up a bit – in GW1 the hardcore players were grinding thousands of hours for these to feel prestigious, and they really were an “oh wow” factor when you saw someone with a cool title.

- Skins – make different tiers of skins, not stats! You say exotics are too easy to get and legendaries too hard – make some skins that fit inbetween to fill the time-gap you want to close! Some of these skins already exist in game as exotics, how about you add a new tier like legendaries (no stat difference, just prestiege) and make them cooler than exotics but less cool than legendaries!

- Cool emotes – rank/zrank and these come to mind. Make them availabe outside of the pvp lobby and people will go kittening mental about them – everyone who played GW1 knows that. Make an emote for sPvP (we already have that kinda), make one for WvW and have it require multiple things (kills/captures/100% WvW map etc.), make one for PvE and have it require every dungeon every run completed/100% world map and similar things.

- More content – you are doing this incredibly well! And that does count as progression a lot! If you keep pumping new content updates like these every 1/2/3 months, people will keep playing the game like no other! Doing new content is worth endlessly more than repeating old one so this is the thing that will keep people playing the most! And of course, couple it with unique skins and other cool items in the gem store (town clothes, cool consumables, new dances?) and you will have enough money to keep Colin smiling for ever (and we all know that is the whole point anyway)!

Ok so this turned out to be much longer than I though it will be and I seriously hope someone reads this at some point (please if someone does, just reply and you will make me very very happy). And if nothing else, perhaps if you listen to these suggestions and make us happy, perhaps, you will get some more… cupcakes?

Let’s see how long people keep this discussion rolling. It’s been on the top of the forums for 3 days now, turning potential newbies off the game. I wouldn’t be surprised if it lasted several weeks without a positive response from A-net.

mulch.2586:

Umm… then why would I grind fractals?

I kinda actually do want something to “work” toward.

I can see that ascended gear really isn’t going to matter much, but at least it’s something.

Work?
This is a game. Do you also want to work while playing your alts?

I hope these new players bring in a bunch of money for them. They aren’t getting any more of mine unless something changes.

It took me a lot of time to get my main character into exotics. Nothing like waking up one day and finding out you have a bunch of hard-earned, expensively skinned, second-rate gear.

- Yes.
- No.
- Yes (just dungeons content).

I don’t care of infusions, if I want to do dungeons and I enjoy that content, it’s correct I get stuff with infusion slots doing dungeons or crafting that stuff.

Since I’m interested just to WvWvW and open world Pve, I would like simply that they acknowledge their mistake and have exotic, ascended, legendary and future gear with the same stats cap, as it was stated.

The only vertical progression I could accept and enjoy would be WvWvW ranks like the RvR ranks in DAoC or WAR. But even this would be against what previously stated, so I would understand and support the ones against it.

Onshidesigns.1069:

mulch.2586:

Umm… then why would I grind fractals?

I kinda actually do want something to “work” toward.

I can see that ascended gear really isn’t going to matter much, but at least it’s something.

Work?
This is a game. Do you also want to work while playing your alts?

not sure if trolling or just clueless.